Adult care home made employees work through breaks in CA, feds say. It owes $690,000

An adult care provider in California owes workers more than $690,000 in back pay and damages after it denied them some of their earnings, according to the Department of Labor.

Neldy’s R.C. Inc., operating as Neldy’s Adult Residential Care Home, based in Garden Grove, did not add up all the hours worked by some employees, according to a Jan. 10 news release from the Department of Labor. It also paid them with multiple paychecks to try and hide the fact that they were missing wages, the department said.

Workers were sometimes forced to work through meal breaks and the provider did not keep accurate time and payroll records, the release says.

A person who answered the phone at the care home said that supervisors would not be in until the afternoon.

A court ordered Neldy’s to pay $690,696 — $345,348 in back wages and $345,348 in damages — to 108 affected employees, the release says. The provider must also pay $25,000 in civil penalties for the “willful violations,” according to the release.

The court order prohibits the provider from committing further violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the release says. The provider has 12 locations in Orange and Riverside counties in California, according to the Department of Labor.

The Department of Labor investigated the company’s pay practices between 2013 and 2016 and discovered that it had violated minimum wage and overtime provisions, the release says. Through those investigations, the department recovered $1,069,730 for 58 workers.

“The court’s action and our investigation send a clear message to unscrupulous care industry employers that we will hold them accountable for their attempts to exploit their workers and deprive them of their hard-earned wages,” Min Park-Chung, director of the department’s wage and hour division district in San Diego said in a statement. “The fact that the operator of Neldy’s Adult Residential Care Home continues to abuse their workers’ rights so blatantly despite their prior violations is truly appalling.”

Garden Grove is about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

This story was originally published January 11, 2023 at 12:21 PM with the headline "Adult care home made employees work through breaks in CA, feds say. It owes $690,000."